Michael Callen is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at UC Berkeley. He completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, San Diego in 2011. His current research focuses on whether social and reconstruction programs reduce violence, the political economy of corrupt networks, the effect of electoral manipulation on perceptions of legitimacy and support for insurgents, the effect of violent trauma on economic preference, and the effect of formal financial access on informal institutions for saving and consumption-smoothing. Randomized control trials in support of this agenda have been recently completed in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Uganda and will begin this fall in Pakistan and at the newly established American University Afghanistan Behavioral Research Laboratory. This research has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Center, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), DFID, and CEGA. Callen has published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and has research under invited resubmission at the Journal of International Economics and the British Journal of Political Science. He has a BSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics.